Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Besides lead gen, how about having ready to go packages for the diy people? You can probably have it drop shipped by other online providers. Lead gen is fine and all but I already get postered by a ton of lawn care sales people who basically provide the same service.by pryelluw
- A lot of the lawn care lead websites don't offer ZIP code exclusivity, which we do. And the leads are already warm, because they are actively seeking a solution to a definite problem. This all hinges on a large amount of traffic, but when the leads do come, their conversion rate should be pretty high. We also rely on affiliate income to monetize. Ready-to-go packages could be offered in the future, not a bad idea.by andrewbr
- That’s a great point! However, I think it would be better if your service better reflected the fact that you’re a veterinarian. For example, determining the appropriate grass or turf for grazing horses, or checking whether they’re being cared for in a way that prevents injuries.by hasudon7171
- I’ll definitely try this out. I have a Claude project for our home and many chat conversations about my lawn.
What I don’t know yet is if the DIY I’m doing with the help of Claude is going to materialize into a lush lawn.
It has me doing pre-emergent spray, broad leaf weed killers, and moss killer.
It’s a lot of work and I’m sure there is a much better UX than saved chats.
by jmathai - Yes, please try it and let me know! I think you'll find the output a little nicer than a chat, which is exactly why I made this. If it sucks, let me know why so I can improve it. Thank you!by andrewbr
- To be fair a lot of good product ideas come from personal experiences like yours, not weird. Seems like a solid idea, when you say tailored to location does that account for the different types of grass across geographies? If you're interested in a market snapshot to look at competitors I built a one-time competitive intelligence report tool at stratica.ca covering competitor positioning, market gaps, SWOT, growth action items and more. Could be useful if you want to make it real.
Cheers!
- How do you know the diagnosis is correct?
- added make no mistakes to the prompt so it can not be wrong, ez.by Lionga
- What are you actually providing here? What makes this more useful for someone than just uploading a their lawn images directly to their favorite frontier chatbot?
Did you craft a rich prompt template that's untuitively helpful? If so, what did you see go wrong before you had that figured out? How did you determine it was a positive improvement? How will you make sure that your prompt's benefits hold up as your original model is retired and it needs to be run against whatever new model you're left to use instead?
Or is it just that your website acts like a kind of inspiration a la "Hey, did you ever think to ask AI about your lawn problems?"? If so, how do expect people to find this inspiration when link-delivering search is being agressively retired in favor of synthesized chatbot responses already?
by swatcoder - Our differentiator is that we provide a richer results experience than the typical text-only chatbot response. Rather than a few bulleted sections, we provide a visual guide, a grass health score, 2-3 specific diagnoses with information about each, and three distinct treatment pathways to choose from. A lot of chatbot responses are somewhat wordy or generic and may be based on general internet slop rather than favoring reputable sources. But it's also true that many people never even think to ask a chatbot about their lawn. So to some degree yes, the website also exists to remind people that they in fact can use AI for this purpose. Of course we are targeting Google search for traffic, but to your point that will continue to decline. We plan to use content to drive traffic where possible, as well as good old-fashioned local marketing and direct outreach to service professionals (realtors, hardware stores, etc.).by andrewbr
- I don't have a lawn, but I could use some more software around native habitat restoration for Green Seattle work parties. I end up using Claude or ChatGPT for plant identification because iNaturalist isn't as good, then getting the background on each plant - native? non-native? invasive?
When I'm planting, site selection is important but I'm really slow at it, even when using AI.
I also use AI for some plant diagnosis but that hasn't led to any meaningful action, except that I'll be more thoughtful about site selection for some plants in the future.
Most of this could just be a collection of documents in a Claude project, but hey if more people are working on it I'm all for that even if there are competing tools.
by ktrnka - How comes there is this one very specific style the AI makes websites look like with little to no variance?by herbst
- I know you probably worked a bunch on the website, but the amount of AI slop and obvious AI design is an immediate turn off for myself. And I’d theorize more “normies” are getting “spidey senses” on these types of generic Claude-designed products. I’m seeing them pop up weekly on my small town subreddit.
I’d highly recommend telling Claude something like (untested myself): redesign the website, remove all emojis and all letter-spacing CSS, use non conventional typefaces, no italic serifs, limited cream/beige colors
Something along those lines.
Fun idea, good luck!
- This is really sound advice, thank you.by andrewbr
- A nice idea and good luck! My lawn is dead as our local data center took all the water (I'm kidding!).
We do home property and inventory services using AI on photos as well and the key thing we've found so far is that the biggest rival to those features is just people dragging photos into chatgpt and asking away. So the key here is differentiating from that and making something better and more accurate. What we did was to basically build a better and deeper prompt and history, e.g. context is king in a vertical. So that means the other info the user has put about the property, the memory of previous things asked or seen, combining with publicly available property info we already gather - this would make the information more valuable than straight gpt usage.
So what more can you bring to the bare prompt on the photos to help? What can you build in terms of info about the zip, so you do more 'vertical stuff' before the api call.
by daviding - Great callout, I saw something similar on another site. Essentially instead of just entering your ZIP, you can also enter your estimated lawn size as well as various other parameters to generate a better prompt. I think that would be helpful to build in the next iteration, both to strengthen the results and also differentiate ourselves from GPT. Another thought I had was to potentially build a database of specific, authoritative lawn care information, such as industry journals, textbooks, university extensions, etc from which the GPT must draw upon and reference, rather than using context clues from the internet to try and invent some kind of analysis or treatment.by andrewbr
- I've been slowly working for years on letting clover take over my lawn. I have amazing flows of white flowers in the spring, with the red clover now starting to come in as well. I mow it once the flowers pop up to force the growth back down into the root systems, and I've converted more than half of my 5 acres into clover at this point. It also is speeding up, and will probably be fully clover within a year or two.
My point being - your UX doesn't ask what people's goals are. Not everyone wants a "perfect lawn". Even people who do want grass may have different priorities for their grass - low maintenance vs. low water usage vs. really green, etc.
If you want your product to be different than what the lawn care guys will say, then you need to actually let people do different things in the app. Or, if you are dead set on making this into lead gen for lawn care guys, well... I personally find that somewhat disheartening, but clearly I'm not your audience.
by codingdave - The real proposition here is diagnosing the specific problem and offering specific fixes for said problem. I think the platform provides a good opportunity to present alternatives to the user other than "just fix the problem" and says "have you thought about this instead?" But since the primary user is trying to fix the issue, I don't want to necessarily try to force alternatives my audience isn't looking for. That being said, one option would be to give an option in filling out the form to ask what their goals are, such as "I just want to fix the problem" or "I'm open to exploring new ideas for my lawn."
It's not "just" for lead gen. I'm actually trying to help people and solve a problem. I want the tool itself to be free. It monetizes by means other than making it a paid tool.
by andrewbr - Off topic question and probably a far too ambitious idea... but as a veterinarian, have you thought about working on improvements to the software that vets use?
About six months ago I was spending time with a vet friend, and was hearing stories about terrible user interface and ways the software was getting in the way. The story I most remember was a 60 second timeout requirement to enter patient data before the workstation locked and required logging in again, and that a logout while still typing would cause the current notes in progress to be deleted. I have no idea if those problems are caused by regulation (a kind of kitty HIPPA compliance) or just terrible UX.
I worry that vet software is probably a terrible market as well, with regulation and established providers, maybe it's a lower margin business (certainly not a profit center) and maybe edge cases for each vet practice in the US.
As someone with domain knowledge, perhaps that's a challenge you might consider, now that AI makes coding so accessible across domains now? Since I have zero domain knowledge, it seemed like something I could never help solve.
by SyneRyder - I am committed to some projects now, but I did a full analysis of projects to invest, used AI to validate ideas and so on.
My main goal was "solo founder projects as programmer" and one of them was software for veterinarians (second one was for golf tracks).
It is an interesting niche!
by jeanlucas